tec-- if you look more closely at those players-- their batting average over a career is about what you would expect from their contact and splits. The sim determines that there has been a single, and then makes it an infield single if the player is fast. So the correlation exists but doesn't make the player better.

Posted by dedelman on 1/30/2013 10:26:00 PM (view original):tec-- if you look more closely at those players-- their batting average over a career is about what you would expect from their contact and splits. The sim determines that there has been a single, and then makes it an infield single if the player is fast. So the correlation exists but doesn't make the player better.

"The sim determines that there has been a single, and then makes it an infield single if the player is fast. "

Posted by dedelman on 1/30/2013 10:26:00 PM (view original):tec-- if you look more closely at those players-- their batting average over a career is about what you would expect from their contact and splits. The sim determines that there has been a single, and then makes it an infield single if the player is fast. So the correlation exists but doesn't make the player better.

"The sim determines that there has been a single, and then makes it an infield single if the player is fast. "

How do you know this is true?

Reasonable question. What I did was identify the players with the most career infield hits-- of course, they had a ton of speed. Then, I identified players with the most similar contact/splits (and when I could, eye and power) that were slow and/or had few infield hits. The career batting averages-- and I did 15-20 pairs of players-- were essentially identical, within a reasonable margin of error (10-20 points), and certainly not different by what the number of infield hits involved would change the batting average by.